Heinrich Heine in Paris: the poetics and politics of self-fashioning

Drawing on the concept developed in Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, this thesis presents Heinrich Heine as an extreme case of the ‘self-fashioning’ writer. I argue that his preoccupation with self-construction determines what and how he writes, how he treats his reading public and, crucially, how he perceives and evaluates his own career.Though self-fashioning occurs in his earliest works, Heine’s decision to move to Paris (1831) was the single biggest self-determining act of his life; he constructs it as a moment of rebirth. Inspired by the July Revolution, he sought a new authorial identity in harmony with the supposed new world order and his own social, political and artistic ideals. However, the reality of juste-milieu society—a continual seesawing between modernisation and restoration—cast doubt on the possibility, even the desirability, of novelty and progress, the goals of revolution.In this context, Heine cultivates the identity of a perpetually embattled writer through confrontational dialogue with contemporary ideologies and his readership alike; ever ambivalent in his attitude to the role of art in a modernising world, he is also engaged in an internal battle with the self. First I show how he establishes himself in the role of cultural correspondent in the early journalism by developing a mode of self-conscious spectatorship which enables him to negotiate between contemporary French conditions and German readership expectations. Second I investigate the strategies he uses to free himself from his Buch der Lieder legacy and redefine his identity as a poet in Paris; I show how the Neue Gedichte (1844) are assembled to record and reflect on this transitional process, making the collection a monument to his self-fashioning tendencies. Finally I explore how Heine manipulates the relationship between public and private within a concept of self to construct his authorial identity; I consider a number of self-editing and self-reconstructive practices in prefaces, letters and autobiographical writing.This thesis is not currently available in ORA